Design a Fast Loading Website

In the virtual universe, patience is not a virtue. Even a delay of one second will dramatically reduce the page views. Customer satisfaction will be fewer. Conversions from leads to clients will sharply drop. The site’s organic search rankings will also be negatively affected. Many search engines have written algorithms which include site speed in its computations.

Size is the decisive factor when it comes to loading a web page. Browsers take time when they download the specific code which makes up the page. It must download the HTML, the scripts, the stylesheets and the images. A lot of time can be needed to download such large amounts of data. This can be difficult as the resource files of any website will continue to increase so that users get attracted more to the website. Every added feature must have a new stylesheet or script which makes the website a little heavier than before.

Optimizing images

The images occupy maximum bandwidth space. It slows the download speed. The primary method to optimize the images is to scale them down. A lot of webmasters use large images. They then scale the images down by using CSS. The problem is that the browser continues to load them as if they are at full image size.

The images must be scaled prior to uploading them on any website. Alternatively, you can also compress the images. If you can do this, the images will be optimized automatically. Free online tools are available to perform the latter.

Browser cache

There is no need to make visitors download the same thing repeatedly when they repeatedly load the same page. Data can be stored temporarily by enabling the browser cache option on the computer used by the visitor. There is no requirement to make them wait for some time as the page gets loaded into their device. The time of storing the data depends on browser configuration. The cache settings on the server side also influence storage in this regard.

Compression

This is similar to putting the website in a zip file. Compressing a page leads to significant reduction of the page size. Its speed is also increased. Compression could slash about 70 percent off the CSS and HTML files. The website visitor need now download such huge amounts of data. Do understand that compression is a server setting. Its implementation will depend on the web server and the latter’s settings. In case this is confusing, it is imperative that you contact the hosting company. Also, CDN service providers like our partner CloudFlare provide content caching and compression free of charge, the good thing is that all our customers can get this service for free with any web hosting plan.

CSS optimization

Even before a person views your site, the CSS gets loaded. Longer loading times for CSS means more time loading the web page. An optimized CSS means faster downloading of files. This will provide visitors better access to pages. To optimize, delete any extra code. After this is done, the CSS files must be minimized. This action removes the extra spaces present in the code. This makes sure that the file transforms into the smallest size. Many CMS automatically minimizes the CSS.